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Is This It?
Is This It? is an episode of Sol 101. Previous ep: Prayer of the Refugee Plot When Christian awoke, After some time getting his bearings - spitting the blood from his mouth, wiping the blood from his face, and smearing the blood on his hands on the ground below him instead - he crawled to his feet, took a stand, and looked around himself. One thought immediately entered his head. Is this it? He kicked the ground beneath him with his own foot. It was real. He did not know whether to feel elation or relaxation, so instead he felt bewilderment for a few mild seconds before it turned to melancholy in his mouth. Was this a world of his own creation? As his eyes continued to return to life, he lifted his head and looked upward. He saw the stars, all angry and cutting into his sore eyes with their beams of light. Part of him wished to curse them, but he knew he had already done that long ago, and he had won. Besides, they were under his control, were they not? He looked for a while longer, and saw the moon flash back to life. His eyes eventually floated back down to the surface world. A ways away and off in the distance, he thought he could see the rising tide. It brought a sick smile to his face and he was not exactly sure why. His dream was shattered with the blast of a mortar. It knocked him away and to his side. He collided with the dirt and lay in the dirt like a discarded fetus. The moon above him was a portal to the Void, a place for those without a universe. The tides, which the moon had summoned, was not a motion of water, but rather the same army that he had just tried to wipe out. They wanted blood, and he was covered in it. He tried to muster the strength to control himself, but unfortunately found that he no longer could. He was a broken being. Whatever Alexander had did, colliding him through reality itself, had clearly left an impact on the very fiber of his being. This world, around him and beneath his feet, was not a world of his own creation. No. That would be a lie. This physical world was not a landscape he had created with his eyes, hands, mind, heart, and soul, but rather one that he had merely been washed ashore upon when he landed here. Yet, this reality was one that he had created for himself - even if he did not like it, even if he tried to fight it - subconsciously when he thought he had conquered it all. He deserved it, and deep down, he wanted it, because in the end, the chase was always so much more fulfilling to him than the victory. And, now, the one thing he could do for the rest of his life was to enjoy that pursuit. He was going to run. When he thought he heard another mortar tearing through the air, he stumbled once more on his feet, and then, once his feet had found the proper treadings, he took another few less shaky steps. He eventually reached a state that was deemed "running", although how forever long he maintained it is inconsequential, because this is no longer history, because he played the game, controlled the game, and lost. The story would be no fun if we spent the next ten pages describing whether he was triumphant again in the end, or if he was torn life and limb apart thanks to a few of the characters you know but more realistically by millions of the angry souls that you don't (and likely he never knew personally, either). If that bothers you, pick the happier ending of the two. That's what we're going to do, you and I, and Alexander. Alexander woke up some distance away, perhaps even on some other planet, neither of which are really imporant in the grand scale of things. What's much more important is that he woke up in the first place. Waking up is a miracle that many take for granted. Alexander thought he would have been gone - ka-put - after he crashed through reality, though it seemed as if some sort of being out there in the grand scheme of the universe had managed to bring him back to life. He found the thermos MacGuffin he had created long ago, and, mistaking it for water, lifted it to his lips. He drank a significant amount of the liquids inside before his taste buds springed back to reality and told him that what he was doing was disgusting above all else, and in an instant, his brain agreed. His eyes opened wide and he cast the thermos to the side, where the rest of its contents spilled out and quickly evaporated like some sort of boiled potion. He looked upon it with an indordinate amount of disdain for an undeserving inanimate object. Yes, let's never tell people we accidentally drank our own piss and tears and blood. We'll leave that one out of the glory tales and even the gorey tales.